as old as your omens
by xshedreamsinredx
Summary: Klaus/Rebekah. Post 1x16. "Jerusalem." He tastes the word on his tongue, plucks the consonants hard enough to make the beads on her rosemary lose meaning. "You always did feel drawn to ruins older than yourself."


**Characters: **Klaus/Rebekah, Hope  
><strong>Fandom: <strong>The Originals, The Vampire Diaries.**  
>Warning: <strong>Half-sibling incest and mild sexual content.**  
>Notes: <strong>Post 1x16. I wrote this a long time back and abandoned it, but I discovered it again a few days back, completed it and have finally found the time to publish it now that I'm done with my mid-sem exams.

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><p><strong>as old as your omens<br>**

_"Nec possum tecum vivere, nec sine te  
><em>_I can live neither with you, nor without you."_

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**.**

**.**

It's written on the page beyond the happily ever after.

**X**

Paris. Rome. Tokyo.

They all dissolve into the blur past nothingness between the rust of her bones and mosaic lights that gleam bright enough to sear into her retina, render her blind.

There is something inherently disturbing to have the stretch of infinity inked across the distance from her thumb to forefinger.

She wonders, sometimes, if she can will it away.

.

In this story, he doesn't like his girls voiceless.

**X**

So she calls him sometimes and they don't talk. She talks and he_just_ happens to be there, on the other end, listening in.

"You know why I had to leave, Nik." If she tries hard enough she can hear a child crying in the backdrop, Elijah delivering panicked instructions, Hayley's answering growl.

But Rebekah stopped trying a thousand miles back.

So-

She doesn't. Or pretends that she doesn't. He framed her out in the image of a Renaissance child long before to know where the art of logic fails and lying starts.

"There were far too many secrets between us."

He doesn't fill the silence with cheap, clumsy words because he has never needed to.

She is far too well versed in his white noise already.

"I'll call you again next week." She announces. Refuses to feel disappointed when she can't tempt a word out of him.

.

She doesn't measure out her life in coffee spoons.

**X**

Instead, she measures it out in the iambic pentameter of procrastination. Stretches it out. Prolongs forgetting to love him because she is her mother's daughter; the cage that keeps her heart locked in place was carved out of lapses in judgement and an unflinching faith in possibilities.

Most of the days she is a poetry gone to waste.

"You will forget this," She tells the man bleeding out on her pristine white sheets and watches his eyes freeze, midway in thought.

In the right light, he looks a bit like Nik. She can't possibly bring herself to kill him.

"You won't try to put my face together, remember by name. You won't recall any of this." She bites into her wrist, offers it to him, knows herself to have always been a fool.

.

Every time they kiss, there is an apple that falls sliced.

**X**

He finds her somewhere amidst wreckage.

"Jerusalem." He tastes the word on his tongue, plucks the consonants hard enough to make the beads on her rosemary lose meaning. "You always did feel drawn to ruins older than yourself."

She remembers a time when she had walked on the same soil with her hand clasped tight in his. There was poetry suspended in the air of this city, curled beneath the fissures in walls, trapped inside the holiness of the temple pillars.

"You are getting ahead of yourself brother." She bites out a delicate, humourless laugh. Doesn't flinch away from the curve of his fingers on her skin. That is important. "Romanticism is a luxury you can't afford."

"And you can?" He questions. Thinly veiled malice lacing his words. "Because if a luxury, a fleeting chance at romance was all that you wanted then I hope you found it. Or else your rebellion will all be for the naught."

He leans in, all casual disinterest and sleek threat. "So, tell me, sister. Was it worth it?"

She tastes the bitter resignation in her mouth before she tastes the sin.

.

His brand of tenderness is scrawled with blood.

**X**

"All living is brushwork," he smears, or mouths maybe, against the catch of her frayed skin. And there is this maddening sense of relief sealed in his voice, she doesn't know why but god, there is relief.

"I'd rather if you shut up." She can't quite chalk out the exact moment she chose to land in the same position that she was in a hundred years ago, trapped between a man lost in delusions of grandeur and a language written backward through time.

His grip on her hand shifts to something more bruising, more punishing and the next press of his lips on her skin draws out the red of requiem. "I'm not one of your boys," he is gritting through his teeth, it will leave an impression carved out of sharp recriminations and age old resentment. "You'd do well to remember that."

She laughs because she appreciates irony, it has nothing to do with him, it has never had anything to do with him, it -

And then she starts to cry.

.

Nothing more than an artifice.

**X**

She hates the sight of bleeding maples peeking through the window. It's distressing and depressing for reasons she has lost the count of in the past thousand years of surviving in place of living.

"I am not here to force you back," he lets the words hang in the open and she's intrigued by the prospect that he can still manage to let go of a thousand years of pretence in one of his… his indulgent moments.

"But you're here to ask something of me." The shame never quite makes it out of his eyes in time and the pattern of it etches itself somewhere between the emptiness in her memories.

There is a grim set to his mouth. "Yes," he breathes in the air even though he doesn't need to, "I need you to take my daughter with you."

"Why?" She asks. There is too much distance between them and not nearly enough space.

"Because you're my family." He demands in the same entitled manner that leaves the mere thought of unyielding out of the question. It feels like a noose tightening around her body, guillotine hovering over her neck, anchor sinking her weight into the deep.

She can't turn him away though, he will not let her. "I will not be tolerating your calls on a daily basis."

He nods and tries to piece together something that could possibly classify as a smile in some of the primitive cultures.

She wishes didn't love him so much for trying.

.

A mouthful of interludes.

**X**

There is a little girl on the plane she doesn't know because she never bothered to, she packed her bags and left before she could find herself another reason to chain herself to that bloody town with its rotting corpses and falling regimes.

"You're my aunt from the picture." When she moves her gaze away from the small outstretched hand to her soft, round face, she finds the blue eyes of her brother staring up at her expectantly.

"Yes," she smiles like she doesn't know the imprint of this girl's father on her skin, like she has never known how black blood looks in moonlight, like she can't be faulted for knowing sin and drowning in it, "Rebekah."

"I am Hope."

It almost hurts.

It almost hurts to look at her, it almost hurts to take her hand in hers, it almost hurts to feel the name echo in her ears. She is the daughter Rebekah will never have.

But that won't stop her from bringing her up as her own.

—

Isn't that the price of being Nik's family?

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><p><strong>End Notes:<strong> Well, I hope you enjoyed reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it. Leave a review if you feel like it. I have dropped a bunch off quotes from here and there, the most discernible ones being T.S. Elliot and Katherine Larson, I own nothing.


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